Archives

December, 2012

Here are some of our favorite books in translation from 2012!
Emma Garman
My pick is Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua, trans. by Mitch Ginsburg, an engrossing story about chance, fate and identity. Told from the dual points of view of an upwardly mobile Israeli Arab lawyer, and a...

New Year’s Eve is the perfect time to take stock of your life. As some of our writers show, that’s not always a good thing.
Is there any holiday more confounding than New Year’s Eve? The expectation to have fun is steely and relentless, but all the avenues of pleasure are too...

Our "Translator Relay" series features a new interview each month. This month's translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. This month, Katherine Silver passed the baton to Peter Constantine, an award-winning polyglot whose honors include The PEN/Book of...

Special City Series / New York City 2012
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains....

Basque writer Willy Uribe is now into his twelfth day of a hunger strike in protest against the incarceration of reformed heroin addict David Reboredo. This is the latest in a number of cases demonstrating the Spanish government's perceived double standards when it comes to granting judicial...

If the end of the year doesn't bring the end of the world, you might want to celebrate by looking back at January's Apocalypse issue. With a nod to the supposed Mayan prophecy (and not wanting to dawdle in case it was, well, correct), we devoted the month to the end of days, with...

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Honors and Awards
Kurt Beals is the inaugural winner of the German Book Office Translation Prize. Congratulations!
Check out the 2013 Longlist for the International Prize for Arabic Literature.
Interviews, Articles, Reviews
“Our old family wallpaper and curtains,”...

Special City Series / New York City 2012
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains....

SUBMIT
what: The French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation are currently accepting submissions for the Annual Translation Prize—a $10,000 cash award for the best English translation of French in both fiction and non-fiction.
submission deadline: January 15, 2013
more...

After studying some of the greatest works of Spanish and Latin American literature about love with Edith Grossman, the award-winning translator of Cervantes, Gabriel García Márquez, Álvaro Mutis, Mayra Montero and many others, I began to wonder more about the particular...

Special City Series / New York City 2012
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains....

READ
Honors and Awards
Words without Borders is honored to be a 2013 grant recipient from the National Endowment for the Arts!
Congratulations to all of English PEN's Awards for Writing in Translation winners!
Interviews, Articles, Reviews
Find out who the 10 most popular...

Crime fiction is a popular and pleasurable genre, but it’s also an educational one, especially if you read translated crime fiction.
In my role as the schools and libraries liaison for the British Centre for Literary Translation, which is based at the University of East Anglia in England,...

When I met Susan Harris at the London Book Fair this year, she told me WWB was planning a non-Scandi crime issue. Would I like to look for a Chinese crime short story? she asked. I hesitated… contemporary Chinese writers hardly ever do crime. It just isn’t a popular genre. But...

As the literary adviser to the Palestine Festival of Literature, the poet Najwan Darwish knows how challenging it is to bring people together to talk about literature in a free and unconstrained environment. This is one of the reasons he was invited to FLUPP, the first international literary...

About Words Without Borders

Words Without Borders opens doors to international exchange through translation, publication, and promotion of the best international literature. Every month we publish select prose and poetry on our site. In addition we develop print anthologies, work with educators to bring literature in translation into classrooms, host events with foreign authors, and maintain an extensive archive of global writing.read more »